Cod Almighty | Diary

Hey, ho, let's glow

18 April 2018

Relegation fights do strange things to you. The other week I recalled the one-time Aldershot striker Kirk Hudson. Your original/regular Diary still has no idea whether I ever saw him play, but when he scored twice for Aldershot to condemn Chester to the drop and save Town, it didn't really matter. For a moment back then in 2009 we all wanted Kirk Hudson's babies.

So it was last night, when a seam of Devonian DNA was unexpectedly discovered running through the Grimsby and Cleethorpes area. Our new BFFs Exeter City duly did the business against our relegation nemesises Chesterfield, and Town's battle against the drop suddenly looks 9 per cent less doomed than it did previously.

Of course, if Chesterfield and Barnet lose all the rest of their games, and the wind is blowing in the right direction, and the DeLorean reaches 88mph, then we can just put our feet up. In the likely event, however, that Jolley's enigmatic battlers have to, well, battle, we'll want to know which of them are actually capable of taking the field. And so today's most significant item of news is that Simeon Jackson and Ben Davies played for the reserves yesterday and we are able to use the word 'unscathed'.

Davies, it appears, will be in contention for a start when Town travel to Swindon this weekend, probably replacing Reece Hall-Johnson at right-back (although I'm not quite sure what's happened to Zak! Mills). Jackson isn't quite so far on and it sounds like he'll just be on the bench – sad news for those of us desperate for the possibility of a hope of something resembling the chance of GTFC scoring goals. Which, clearly, is all of us.

Those of us wondering what's happened to Fentydome II – which, clearly, is some of us – won't learn much from a piece in the Grimsby Telegraph about the redevelopment of Freemo. No, you can't have the stadium there. Why? Because there isn't room for the training pitches. Is it absolutely necessary for the training pitches to be adjacent to the stadium? Obviously not – but the media, the council and the club have all chosen not to address that point, and we don't deserve any better from any of them, because we're just scum from north Lincolnshire, where abnormal is normal, where everything fails. Nice weather today, though, eh?

The very best wishes from all of us at Cod Almighty go to the new intake at Town's youth academy, whose names have been published today. I love looking at the names of young footballers and how the trends change. We moved on from the trend of having two surnames and no first name (Cole Mills, Robson Burnett) to the austerity-tinged, keep-calm-and-carry-on trend of having names like soldiers in the Second World War (Joe, Alfie, Charlie etc etc), and now we've got a named-after-The-Beatles trend. Well, we've got a lad called Lennon Stead, anyway.

Most of all, though, I love the way the word 'scholars' is used to signify young footballers, and I will forever nurture a mental image of them emerging from training in horn-rimmed spectacles and elbow-patched cardigans, scampering gauchely to a dusty library to research the development of early steam locomotives or Renaissance drama.

And finally today, futsal still isn't football. Bye.